Balance discussion/suggestions

[Strela]

So are the changes going to make the title more balanced for fairness for PBEM games? Is the objective of these changes to move away from the actual results of these battles for the sake of fairness of PBEM games?

Is there issues with the scenarios or the game engine? I have read comments that the weapons lack actual stats and the scenarios need less objectives or more time. I only counted 30 PBEM games played so far and there are quite a few scenarios never played. Shouldn't more games be played before adjustments are made?

As for scenario designs, I have a bit of time into SB games in the past. Red Victory has a bunch of well balanced scenarios, but the older SB titles have LOTS of very unbalanced fights. Oz put a lot of time and testing into the RV scenarios and it shows.

The objective is to not move away from the actual result of the battle. I always setup scenarios that try and emulate the history of a battle and reward a player for doing better than his historical counterpart. In some cases that may mean less losses or not 'losing' as badly as the players historical counterpart.

In the bulk of cases the player vs AI scenarios work well. The HTH less so. For example Gertsovka has the problem of insufficient turns and all the Soviets unlocked at the beginning of the game. These two factors have been adjusted to improve the chance the German's have of winning the scenario - yet the German has to do what their counterparts did historically. There is tweaking being done to ensure any player exploits that have been deemed unreasonable are countered. There is a fair bit of work to do in the HTH scenarios and I view it as a WIP as more results come in. Just remember my mantra - grade a scenario and its victory condition on what happened historically.

As far as the engine, yes there are areas that are being looked at. This is a v1.00 release and there is no harm in going back and looking at areas that may look like there are considerations to be taken into account. The major one we are working with is armor vs arnor and there are a number of different solutions being tested.

So in summary we are looking at the obvious errors - as you point out a fair number of scenarios have not been played and they will only be adjusted as sufficient data comes in.


David

[Richie61]

Interesting take.

I think that some people want this is be a generic game of "Red Force vs Blue Force". This way both sides have the same equipment and men quality. Worked for AH. I would rather see the forces be as they were
and the results the same as real world if as you said the the side does way their reflective side did back then. I see you doing lots of updates in the future to correct the scenarios that haven't been played yet.
That is going to suck for you :(

Being from an Engineering background I don't see you having enough data yet to make adjustments to the game engine yet. There are 58 or so scenarios and 40 of them are not even played yet. Isn't that roughly 68% of the scenarios haven't been played.

I could be missing the point here too.....

[Dog Soldier]

Being from an Engineering background I don't see you having enough data yet to make adjustments to the game engine yet. There are 58 or so scenarios and 40 of them are not even played yet. Isn't that roughly 68% of the scenarios haven't been played.

I could be missing the point here too.....

This is not entirely correct. There is more going on than what you have seen here. The blitz ia piece of the puzzle, that is all.

Dog Soldier

[Richie61]

This is not entirely correct. There is more going on than what you have seen here. The blitz ia piece of the puzzle, that is all.

Dog Soldier

Ok.

Meaning other ladders and groups? Where? I am always looking for more places to gather intel from and kick a little butt!

[ComradeP]

Being from an Engineering background I don't see you having enough data yet to make adjustments to the game engine yet. There are 58 or so scenarios and 40 of them are not even played yet. Isn't that roughly 68% of the scenarios haven't been played.

This is a point that many game developers stick to, but I strongly disagree with it.

The idea might actually be one of the issues I keep running into with various wargames: not all of the mechanics were checked to see if they could work within the confines of the rest of the system, even though you could do so with a calculator in many cases.

I'm not inclined to (beta)test wargames anymore for developers that are known for not responding to what the test team finds, as that decreases the quality of the final product and means testing is to a significant extent a waste of time for the test team. I've been in that situation a few times, unfortunately.

Let's say you have some machinery with a part that isn't entirely functional. You know the part isn't entirely functional because you can verify that purely by testing the machine. By a process of elimination, you're also likely to find the part that isn't working, although maybe not the cause.

What you're saying is that you need to test the machine in various conditions before determining that, but that's not true. The problem is in the machine, not in the conditions it's used in.

The beauty of game mechanics, based on a mathematical system, is that many results can be predicted without playing a single turn. That's not enough to balance things, but if you play it and determine that the predictions were correct, you can balance things.

Something like armour vs. armour performance won't change from scenario to scenario. The results might be slightly different due to the terrain the tanks fight in, but the actual mechanics won't change. Likewise, AA performance of non-AA units won't change either from scenario to scenario, as their AA rating is always 2.

Being a mathematical system, you can safely detach the workings of the unit values from the way an actual scenario works when it comes to determining how the various values interact with eachother. The impact they have on an actual scenario does need to be tested.

A number of the results we're seeing now were probably a surprise to the developers, so I'm not saying they failed in their testing process. It's a new game partially relying on mechanics ported from other titles, and unexpected results pop-up. In this case, it would have been more difficult to estimate how things would work in practice as the mechanics might work fine in the titles they came from, but not in the specific Panzer Battles Kursk setting.

Note that aside from Gertsovka, I'm not saying a scenario is broken as such, only that for some scenarios the point totals seem odd and that there's a difference in pace depending on how elaborate Soviet defences are and how good the Soviet and German units are.

Commenting on starting positions or VP positions wouldn't make sense until scenarios have been thoroughly tested.

[Richie61]

I think you are trying to take a very abstract type of combat and excepting it to return better results.

At this game scale there is not way to factor in every piece of the pie. It's basically a modern PC version
of my very first board game.
[img][/img]

I see this more of a scaled down PzC game engine. It's a theoretical reputation of combat at a scale of 1 hex equal to 250 meters, 1 turn equal to 30 minutes of time and platoon scaled units. It's an abstract combat game. It's kind of between PzC and SB.

PzC has a scale of 1 hex = 1 km, 1 turn = 2 hours of time and battalion and company size combat units.

SB gaming scale is 40 meter hexes and 5 minute turns. Units squad and single vehicles.

I can and have said the same in the pass, but at the end of the day, mine opinion means nothing.....

I still think it's a fun title just the way it sits

[Landser34]

My observations so far from the few games I have played.I think this game could have used a little more head to head testing for these scenario I'm a play tester for the Squad Battles series we test everything against the AI and most of the testers can usually win the scenario but we also play just about every scenario big and small head to head because no AI will play like another human will do and then the results go back to the scenario designer and they make the changes to the scenario. I read somewhere on one of thee boards most of the PZC was tested just against the AI because most people who buy don't play PBEM like all of us here do looks like same thing happened with this game dont get me wrong I really like this game and can see a very good future for it


I know I might not be the best player around but as far a PZC and Squad Battle there is no one who has played more of them and I think just a few tweaks to some of the scenarios I have played like added some points to objectives or turns to make some of the scenarios where you have to launch into a headlong assault because you just dont have the time to make a deliberate attack to me this is the best of both worlds of Squad battles and PZC

I hope the guy that worked on this dont think Im attacking them because I know the time they put into these games for everybody but for the next one just a little more head to head testing and you will have an outstanding game.

[Strela]

My observations so far from the few games I have played.I think this game could have used a little more head to head testing for these scenario I'm a play tester for the Squad Battles series we test everything against the AI and most of the testers can usually win the scenario but we also play just about every scenario big and small head to head because no AI will play like another human will do and then the results go back to the scenario designer and they make the changes to the scenario. I read somewhere on one of thee boards most of the PZC was tested just against the AI because most people who buy don't play PBEM like all of us here do looks like same thing happened with this game dont get me wrong I really like this game and can see a very good future for it


I know I might not be the best player around but as far a PZC and Squad Battle there is no one who has played more of them and I think just a few tweaks to some of the scenarios I have played like added some points to objectives or turns to make some of the scenarios where you have to launch into a headlong assault because you just dont have the time to make a deliberate attack to me this is the best of both worlds of Squad battles and PZC

I hope the guy that worked on this dont think Im attacking them because I know the time they put into these games for everybody but for the next one just a little more head to head testing and you will have an outstanding game.

No offense taken; all feedback is welcome.

There are tweaks being done to the HTH scenarios as we speak. All the changes being made now will impact both Kursk and future games in the series. Our aim is to ensure that everyone gets the game in the best state we can make it.

David

[Richie61]

David,

Dennis and I just played "#0705_09a Butovo - The Gatekeepers of Cherkasskoye" for the first time.
Dennis gave details that were spot on

https://www.theblitz.club/records/b-14.h...d&id=95656

[ComradeP]

Butovo's not too difficult to win in my opinion, it might actually be too easy.

All you need to do is outflank the town from the west, where there are only a handful of Soviet units, capture the supply VP that the Soviets can't possibly defend against a concentrated assault and move into the town to capture a few victory hexes.

It's one of the scenarios where how you advance matters a lot. If you move into the town, you might run out of time. If you outflank the Soviet positions, the Germans will win most of the time.